During the 1980s something called the cassette was a popular recording format. Apparently. In the MP3 era, the analogue format's long forgotten, but it's coming back, thanks to this novel MP3 player.
standalone_or_car_cassette_mp3_player The MP3 cassette is half MP3 player and half real cassette
The gadget may look like one …

Nice for those stuck with cassettes in their cars

Older hi-fi

My hi-fi is only a couple of years old, but doesn't have a USB port or anything. This would be quite useful as I could just shove some music on it and put it in the hi-fi's tape slot. Looks better than using a tape connector and my iPod anyway.

Oh and to the first person to comment, I doubt you'd have to press the buttons when it's in the tape deck as it'll just play through them as if it were an actual tape.

Hope it performs better than those tape adapter things

Incompatible with most auto-reverse mechanisms, so when you were lucky enough to get any sound out at all, it was drowned out by the auto-reverse clunk-clicking every couple of seconds. Obviously in Sherwood's chavved up Uno, the bass bins would compensate in return.

Rewind

It'd be sweeter if it worked the other way round.

I.e. if it could /record/ mp3s. Then you could simply press record+play on either a twin tape deck or a tape deck hooked up to turntable for one last blast of analogue nostalgia before dropping the resultant mp3s onto yer hard drive.

Better than plugging the tape player or turntable into the PC line in and then fannying around with Audacity or similar. And more likely to happen, too. Has /anyone/ got round to the never-gonna-happen job of mp3/jpeg/mpeg-ising their tapes/records/photos/VHS)?

@ David Gosnell

I have to completely disagree with your assessment of the old cassette converters. I wish I still had a tape deck in my car so I could make use of them again, they were wonderful, basically turning your car stereo into a universally compatible amp. I never found auto-rewind a problem (it never kicked in because the 'tape' never ran out, maybe your adaptor had a sticky reel causing it to make the car think it had reached the end of the tape) and the sound quality was, whilst not your 256Kps (or whatever), as good as any genuine tape and when actually driving the road noise made a mockery of any quality anyway.

These crappy 'jack in to a radio frequency' devices they have these days are twice as expensive as cassette adaptors ever were, are interrupted by even the weakest local radio station and have to be re-tuned every 100 miles anyway. If the batteries last. Which they don't, and I hate having bloody trailing wires from cigarette lighter everywhere.

Yes, I would love one of those stereos that had a jack in, but frankly I can't afford a new car stereo. I guess I just miss the nineties.

Cassette love

I just bought a cassette adapter with composite lead and 3.5mm plug for my 2005 Merc c230 Kompressor... works a treat. If I'd know about this before I'd have bought one, saves the MP3 player... come to think of it, I might get one anyway...

I'll get my Crombie-coat, my best cassette years were in the late 1960's and early 1970's delivering newspapers with my cassette on the rack on the bike of my bike.

Could be handy

I'm currently burning podcasts to cheap CDs and playing them in a CD player with output connected to input of a tape deck and recording so I can listen to them in my car. Partly because I'm too cheap to buy a CD player or MP3 player and adapter, partly because high heat and sunlight will destroy recordable discs.